Photographer: Bartek Sadowski/Bloomberg Importing Apple Trees Instead of Apples, Russia Secures Food

To understand how President Vladimir Putin is weaning Russians off foreign food, look no further than the apple trees growing in the Krasnodar region near the Black Sea, where a Soviet-era orchard once flourished. They’re mostly from Italy. Russia is the world’s largest apple importer because local varieties spoil faster than those grown in Europe or China and shoppers often prefer the taste of imported fruit. When farm operator AFG National Group sought to upgrade supplies in 2015, rather than use domestic crops, the company shipped in 143,000 trees from fields 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) away. It’s new orchard near the Caucasus Mountains will produce about 8,000 metric tons of Gala, Red Delicious and Granny Smith apples this year. Deciding to use the latest technology in planting orchards, we realized that, unfortunately, national research in this area lags behind the leading European and global trends,” said Oleg Ryanov, who runs the orchard unit at AFG, which until the apple investment in Krasnodar was growing mostly rice on 70,000 hectares (173,000 acres) in southern Russia. “From the very start, we took a cue from European countries.”